Phone Screen (Android project small feature)

Virtual Onsite

• System Design (Android)
• Problem Solving and Domain Knowledge (Questions on arrays and many Android topics)
• Hiring Manager Round
• Android Live Coding (1.5 hours)

Phone screen: Design a Fragment with a list of items loaded from an API call. Easy.

System Design: The interviewer was rude, to be very honest. I didn't do my very best, but every time I started any discussion, he kept reminding me of the three lines he mentioned at the beginning of the task. I guess they have so many candidates that they can afford to be rude. It was my first System Design round in a long time, so it didn't go as planned.

Problem-solving, Android domain, and Android coding rounds were fantastic. I really enjoyed peer programming with all the interviewers, and the tasks were doable. The Android coding round was 90 minutes long, which is a lot, but it was good.

Hiring Manager round: This is probably why I didn't get the offer (and the System Design round too :/). I think I was set up for failure in this round. Maybe it was a bar raiser (Hiring Manager...weird), but the questions were completely out of the box. He focused on company values but didn't ask any traditional questions that I had prepped very well for.

The tasks were genuinely related to how merchandise would use their app to do things, but I still don't understand what they expected a candidate to figure out all of a sudden (like a SWOT analysis or a STAR response for a spontaneous question :/).

I tried to come up with some creative ideas, added some genuine thoughts, and discussed trade-offs, but that probably wasn't enough. I could tell by his blank expressions that he wasn't convinced, but he kept saying fake stuff like, "Oh, that's a great answer..." when maybe he could have nudged me in a better direction.